The long wait is over for Mac and Linux users, They Bleed Pixels is now available for your OS of choice! All three operating systems are also getting the brand new Crimson Update free! More levels, more polish, more blood!

As an extra bonus They Bleed Pixels is 75% off for the next week (June 3-10th)!

While the Crimson Update is free for everyone, its existence came at a terrible cost, documented in our new live action trailer, a collaboration with photographer Paul Hillier.

Crimson Update Features:

New engine rewritten in C for 60fps gameplay on netbooks and older computers.

Shorter and easier Novice Difficulty levels.

New bonus levels! Winter’s End and exp. 666.

Record, play and share your best runs on the leaderboards. Watch the top players to improve your runs!

Enhanced blood effects! Double the blood particles!

Support for both DirectInput and XInput controllers.

Lots of other little bits of polish, from save games to graphics options.

Spent yesterday working on some character art with comic artist Eric Kim. Here are some examples of the pencils he drew and my final pixel art drawn over them. These are all for a new thing we won’t be announcing for awhile yet.

I just finished colouring this portrait of General Bauhaus, Guerrilla Gardening's 'big bad' responsible for outlawing all plants within the city limits. Likethe previousportraits it's drawn by the talented Eric Kim.

It's always a treat getting to work with his inks, and was nice and relaxing to just sit and colour after a week of animating. I'm without a tablet at the moment so this was all done with a mouse, not the most efficient way to colour but hey it works!

This portrait is a reworked version of his earlier pencil sketch, I've put that under the cut for comparison. You can see we tweaked his design a quite a bit between versions.

Here's yet another batch of Eric Kim's character sketches for the game. As before: rough drafts, probably will be changes, no names yet and not giving too much info to avoid spoilers.
If you haven't seen the previous character art I posted:

I'm posting two more of General Bauhaus' ministers today and they're pretty much polar opposites. In fact I'm pretty sure they aren't going to get along very well...

The Minister of Truth and Entertainment

This one's a real favorite among us, I think it's the sparkly military outfit. He's in charge of both public surveillance (those obquitous CCTV cameras) and propaganda on state television. Every weekend he runs a popular variety show that combines the two. The things on his arms and shoulders are little camera bots.

The Minister of Trade and Contraband

This minister is in charge of policing the borders of the city and keeping 'dangerous illegal contraband' like plants and seeds from being smuggled in. To help him achieve this goal he's been put in charge of the police K9 unit and in truth cares more about his dogs then he does about border security.

While the Minister of Entertainment is all glitz and glamor this Minister sees himself as a bit of a rebel and dresses the part.

Without color it's difficult to tell, but each of the Ministers wears a variation of the same military jacket. We're also planning on giving them some similar insignia and the same basic color scheme, this will help unify their diverse character designs. We could have given them all the exact same uniform and style but I think it's much more fun to go this rout and let them really stand out from each other.

I'm not entirely happy with his official title, it's not quite as amusing and self contradictory as most of the others so it'll probably get changed at some point.

Here's the next batch of Eric Kim's character sketches for the game. As before: rough drafts, probably will be changes, no names yet and not giving too much info to avoid spoilers. If you haven't seen the previous art I posted... click here... and here.

The Kid

A street kid that the Guerrilla Gardener's adopt. The version on the right is how he looks when they find him, on the left how he looks after Molly gives him a haircut and some hand-me-downs. His personal transformation nicely mirrors the in game transformation of citizens from depression to super happy citizens. I want to find a way to keep that little sticky up hair when he gets his mohawk in the final version. It's a nice identifying mark and will help link the two designs.

The Minister of the Environment & Chemical Weapons

General Bauhous has deligated various duities to his Ministers. Each of them have slightly weird contradictory titles. This particular minister is a grizzled vet with an obsession for spicy foods and tear gas (that's a hot pepper in his mouth not a cigarette).

These would have been up earlier if I hadn't been at the best indie games festival ever (aka IndieCade' 09) in Culver City over the weekend. Twenty nine fantastic games were playable with a real emphasis on diversity along with a bunch of interesting and entertaining talks, but the real star of the conference was the laid back atmosphere. I easily made more friends at this one event then I have from attending the last three years of the GDC. If you're an indie developer or working on becoming one I cannot recommend attending the next IndieCade enough. Adam over at Attract Mode has a nice little write up that sums it up with a photo of a bunch of us and Keita 'Katamari' Takahashi at the after party playing Tuning.

As promised I'm going to start posting some of Eric Kim's excellent concept work for the cast of Guerrilla Gardening. All of these will eventually get the inks and full colour treatment you see in Molly's portrait. Since these are concepts, some of them will probably change and a few may get scrapped or replaced as I work on the story and Andrew and I flesh out the game proper. I'm also going to keep the info on each minimal since I don't want to spoil anything. My plan is to post one or two of these every weekend for the next month or so.

The Scientist

An important member of the Guerrilla Gardeners she develops the fast growing plants Molly uses. I'm thinking of changing her hair to differentiate her a bit more from Molly, it's a different style but still a little too close, since they both have their hair up. On the other hand once it's coloured she may look different enough. She doesn't have a proper name yet and I'm happy to keep it that way till I'm farther along in the writing. I'll probably give her a name that references a famous woman scientist or two.

General Bauhaus

The game's 'big bad', his military dictatorship banned all plants from the city. His design is close to final, although Eric and I discussed giving his uniform a bit more decoration, after Eric drew Bauhaus' rather eccentric group of ministers the General started looking a little plain in comparison. His name comes from the European architectural movement with it's sparse functional approach. Tangent! I'm actually leaning toward Brutalism for most of the government buildings in the game, but General Brualist has a very different connotation and Bauhaus just sounds right.

That's it for now. I'll post another sketch or two next weekend. I'm off to L.A. for Indiecade at the end of the week, but I'm going to try to post another, more pixel art filled, update before I leave.

Eric Kim came by yesterday to do up some character portrait sketches for Guerrilla Gardening and exceeded our already high expectations. They really look fantastic! I'll be putting proper cleaned up scans of each of these online over September but I thought I'd give a little peak today.

A few of these are Molly's fellow guerrilla gardeners but most of them are General Bauhaus' ministers who help run the dictatorship.

Eric Kim, who'll be doing the character portraits and other large illos for Guerrilla Gardening:SoR, recently posted his piece for the upcoming Darkstalkers' Tribute book from Udon.

I'm terrible at fighting games and can't really claim I'm a fan of the series, but everything I've seen for the book is looking fantastic. Eric's piece is no exception. I'm meeting up with Eric in the next month to prepare some character sketches for GG, and this only makes me more excited to start working with him again!

If you missed my previous post with Eric's portrait for Molly, you can find it here.

I've been working with comic artist Eric Kim on a final character design for Molly and here is the result! The pencils and inks are all his and I just went in and did some cleanup and the colouring. Eric is going to be creating portraits and possibly even some comic book style cut scenes for important story scenes when we create the final version of the game. So like the previous screen mockup this is a little sneak peak of what we're hoping to achieve in the final version.

I've been keeping all the sketches that lead up to this final design, and I'll post them up sometime in the future.

Back in the day Eric and I were both 3D artists at a visual effects studio working on some not so great films and doing mini-comics on the side, so it was fun to get to work with him again. If you dig this you should check out his blog and portfolio there's some fantastic stuff in both. When he's not doing art for Guerrilla Gardening he's busy at work on the upcoming Billy Smoke graphic novel written by B. Clay Moore.

Spooky Squid Games

Carefully crafted independent games mixing old school presentation with modern design. A fine blend of super cute pixels and dark occult secrets. Creators of Night of the Cephalopods, They Bleed Pixels and others.

SPOOKY SQUID GAMESCarefully crafted independent games mixing old school presentation with modern design. A fine blend of super cute pixels and dark occult secrets. Creators of Night of the Cephalopods,They Bleed Pixels and others.